War

• The transaction accelerates Liquidity Services’ penetration of the southwest US market for municipal government surplus and expands the size of Liquidity Services’ overall transportation and used equipment footprint.
• Established in 1986 in Phoenix, AZ, Sierra Auction is the sole auction outlet for seized and forfeited assets from several prominent state and county government agencies in Arizona.
• Additionally, Sierra has partnered with numerous charity organizations to auction donated vehicles.
• Liquidity Services expects to retain Sierra’s current management team and its employees following the transaction.

• John Pilger, a giant of journalism born in Australia in 1939, has died at the age of 84, according to a statement released online by his family.
• His numerous books and especially his documentaries opened the world’s eyes to the failings, and worse, of governments in many countries – including his birthplace.

‘I am, by inclination, anti-authoritarian’

• Whatever the merits of Waugh’s criticism, they are, in my view, outweighed by the breadth and depth of Pilger’s disclosures in the public interest.
• It is my duty, surely, to tell people when they’re being conned or told lies.
• I am, by inclination, anti-authoritarian and forever sceptical of anything the agents of power want to tell us.

Telling the stories of ordinary people

• Like many of his generation, he moved to the UK in the early 1960s and worked for The Daily Mirror, Reuters and ITV’s investigative program World in Action.
• He reported on conflicts in Bangladesh, Biafra, Cambodia and Vietnam and was named newspaper journalist of the year in Britain in 1967 and 1979.
• He made more than 50 documentaries.
• He did this by telling the stories of ordinary people he had encountered, whether miners in Durham, England, refugees from Vietnam, or American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War – not to parades, but to lives dislocated by the silence and shame surrounding the war’s end.

The world has lost a resolutely dissenting voice

• In Welcome to Australia [Pilger’s 1999 film], he concentrated on the bad things that were happening but not the good.
• He’s a polemicist and, if you want to arouse people’s passions and anger, the stronger the polemic, the better.
• Whatever flaws there are in Pilger’s journalism, it feels dispiriting that on the first day of a new year clouded by wars, inaction on climate change and a presidential election in the US where democracy itself is on the ballot, the world has lost another resolutely dissenting voice in the media.

Matthew Ricketson is the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s representative on the Australian Press Council.

• That might be a traditional beach read – typically a genre paperback with a propulsive plot – or an opportunity to catch up on the classics you never got around to during the year.
• We asked six experts in reading and writing to share what they plan to read on the beach.

Love and Other Scores by Abra Pressler (and other Australian romantic comedies)

• The book I’ll be taking to the beach this summer, just in time for the tennis, is one of Pan Macmillan’s latest offerings: Love and Other Scores by Abra Pressler.
• • Harper Collins published Steph Vizard’s The Love Contract (what if pretending to date your neighbour was the solution to your childcare problems?).
• • Simon & Schuster published Amy Hutton’s Sit, Stay, Love (the ultimate rom-com for dog people), my own Can I Steal You For A Second?

Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka

• With winter receding (David Copperfield, followed by Demon Copperhead), I am looking to what kinds of books might fill my summer, so I’m reading a new-to-me crime/thriller writer, Kotaro Isaka.
• The novel follows three men who’ve made careers out of hiring themselves as assassins.
• And best of all, there is a new Kotaro Isaka novel, Mantis, published this month – just in time for the height of summer, under a shady tree by the sea.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and The Flying Doctor’s Christmas Wish by Kathleen Ryder

• Middlemarch and Moby Dick, and this year will be War and Peace.
• On a recent trip to central Australia, I met romance fiction author Kathleen Ryder.
• Her books include Christmas-themed novellas set in Alice Springs, and my pick for this summer is The Flying Doctor’s Christmas Wish.

Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette

• The much-anticipated English translation of the only untranslated novel by the reinventor of dark and darkly witty crime novels, Jean-Patrick Manchette, is the book I most hope to read this summer.
• Skeletons in the Closet features the hermetic, alcoholic Parisian private eye Eugène Trapon, the only fictional creation of Manchette’s to appear in more than one novel.
• Trapon is obviously an heir to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, but Manchette’s novels are only superficially hard-boiled.

Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill and Between You and Me by Joanna Horton

• Some books can’t be digested at once, so this summer I will be returning to Daisy and Woolf by Goan-Anglo-Indian poet and author, Michelle Cahill.
• Also on my list is Between You and Me by Brisbane author, Joanna Horton.

The science fiction of Samuel R. Delany and Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang

• This summer, I’m aiming to dive deeper into the works of Samuel R. Delany, who was memorably profiled in the New Yorker earlier this year.
• Delany is most commonly associated with the New Wave science fiction movement of the 60s and 70s, but his writing spans a fascinating range of genres and subjects.
• I’ve also wanted to read Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R.F.

• Beth Driscoll receives funding from ARC Linkage Project grant LP210300666 Community Publishing in Regional Australia Liz Evans' debut novel will be published by Ultimo Press in 2024.
• Michelle Cahill is the current Hedberg Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tasmania.

• Rising prices borne disproportionately by low-wage workers, particularly in a public sector squeezed by a “Tories in turmoil” UK government.
• Not December 2023, in fact, but December 1973, as Britain prepared for the three-day working week that commenced on January 1.
• The union was pushing for an improved pay offer from the miners’ employer, the state-owned National Coal Board (NCB).
• Edward Heath’s Conservative government was determined to resist the miners’ claim.

What caused the crisis

• The crisis had been caused by the big switch in Britain’s energy market from coal to oil.
• Coal had been king as late as 1957, responsible for 80% of energy consumed in Britain.
• Accompanied by the rise of natural gas and introduction of nuclear energy, the coal miners felt this transition was unjust.

• This appealed to young miners, who were conscious of their vital social role in powering Britain’s homes and workplaces.
• Their sense of injustice was piqued by friends and relatives earning more in easier factory jobs, assembling cars and consumer goods.
• They first mobilised for a national strike in 1972, the first since 1926.
• Remembered most for the mass blockade of Saltley fuel depot in Birmingham, this won the miners a big pay increase.

The present day

• Beckett argued that it made visible two important elements of the future of work.
• One was extended working time, with non-essential factories and offices running 12-hour shifts on their permitted days.
• This meant they were employed normally during the three-day week, whereas there was enforced idleness among the greater clustering of men in non-essential industrial occupations.

• Two further observations can be made, reflecting back on the three-day week being related to energy and the insecurity of essential workers.
• The 1973 drama, while driven by the coal dispute, was aggravated by the external shock of Opec production controls and the five-fold oil price increase.
• Our difficulties in 2023 are similarly multi-causal, but inflation and economic insecurity have been amplified, as in 1973, by oil and gas price hikes.

Jim Phillips has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust..